Since we introduced the Acceptable Ads program to facilitate a middle ground between content creators and users that are annoyed by obnoxious ads, we have always announced all applicants here in the forum before adding them to the whitelist. The reasons for doing so are to (1) maintain transparency, (2) get help from the community with the monitoring, and (3) to ensure that the same rules are enforced with everyone equally without exceptions. Typically, we have waited a few days so that people could manually add the exception rules to their filters and comment if they spotted a violation of the rules. After a few days (and if there was no violation), the exception rules were added to the whitelist, the topics were closed and commenting was no longer possible.

We believe this process can be optimized to make it more efficient and to avoid hurdles for less tech-savvy users to participate.

What is going to change?All exception rules proposed here in the forum will already be added to the whitelist when the post is created. That means you can test the effects of the new rules live on the relevant website without having to change the default settings of Adblock Plus. We are no longer closing topics to make sure that relevant concerns with exception rules can be raised at any time.

What is not going to change?Exception rules will be tested for compliance with the criteria before being added to the whitelist and we are still going to announce every addition to the whitelist here. Whenever there is a violation of the criteria, exception rules will be removed from the whitelist.

We hope this will make the whitelisting process more efficient and it will be easier for everyone to participate in the monitoring of the Acceptable Ads partners. Let us know if you have any suggestions!